He looked at the eager profile, bordered by a riot of autumn-tinted curls, and wondered, a little anxiously, whether Ferlie was growing up a sceptic like her father. And himself. And most of his friends.
He would rather she took both Testaments at a gulp like a pill, in the unquestioning faith that they would purge her as with hyssop according to promise.
He recognized his attitude to be decidedly illogical. Perhaps the simplicity of Mrs. Carmichael was not quite such a matter for humorous reflection, after all. Supposing the Woman-of-the-Future, no longer sheltered from the rough and tumble of things, began universally to don the materialistic armour suited to her defence, and ceased to set her marching song to the awe-inspiring chant:
"We love Thine altar, Lord;Oh, what on earth so dear?For there in faith adored,We find Thy presence near!"
The singers might possess the undeveloped minds of little children. They might. Nevertheless...
"They are such good women, Ferlie."
"I don't consider them any better members of the world's community than you," Ferlie informed him carelessly, adding, "and they have, according to their ideas, much more to gain by being good."
Cyprian did not quite know what to answer. A less humble man might have suspected that he was fast becoming the child's ideal. He only knew that they cared a great deal for one another and that Life, for him, seemed less meaningless, though more unreal, when they were together.
He had chosen the Zoo because it was the nearest open-air entertainment within reach, by tram, of the suburb which contained St. Dorothea's, and Ferlie was not, under Rule 6, allowed to attend indoor places of amusement in term-time. And surely, at fourteen, it was a reasonable spot to take Ferlie, the animal-lover, for recreation.
"But the tea here is beastly," she stated candidly, and he undertook to follow where she should lead when the hour for nourishment approached.
There were long stretches of walking between the enclosures of the Big and Bloodthirsty caged inhabitants which Ferlie favoured. The two strolled along contentedly, exchanging current news.
Presently: "You know she's abroad, Cyprian?"
"Really!"
"You didn't try to find out?"
"Not this time, Ferlie. What's the use?"
Ferlie was frowning.
"Aunt Brillianna asked me for a visit at Christmas. And I went. I like her. She doesn't talk rot to me just because I am not grown up. She goes on like you do. And one wet afternoon another woman came in and said that the Vane girl had gone abroad after a nervous break-down, and Aunt B. said, 'Oh, that's what they've decided to call it? The uttermost ends of the earth would not effect a cure.' And I am telling you, Cyprian, because I feel that if it means that she has been ill, you would rather know."
"Thanks, old lady."
"But, Cyprian——"
"Dear!"
"I can't be a hypocrite about it. I don't really hope it is as bad as smallpox, but if anything does make me hope that Martha and Mary's Day of Judgment is true in every detail, it's her."
"But why, Ferlie?"
"If she came back would you ask her again now?" she asked, ignoring explanation.
He revolved the possibility in his mind, seeking, as ever with her, the meticulously accurate answer her candid eyes deserved.
"I hardly know. I have never met another woman whom I wanted—that way. But then, in my life out East, I see very few Englishwomen, and they are generally married. I have guarded the thought of her, as the Perfect One for me, so long in my heart that, sometimes, I doubt whether any woman could be all that one imagines her when one—cares. It is not fair to endow your Ideal with the qualities which suit you and then blame her for not acting always according to your conceptions."
She walked on silently for some way with bent head and her cheeks unusually flushed. Then she spoke again, rapidly.
"I have got to tell you, Cyprian. From what I have heard, now and again, I think that if you did ask now, you—you'd get the answer you wanted once. There aren't a lot of men like there used to be, and—and I don't understand what it is all about but there is Something.... Well, anyway, you'd stand a good chance now. So I've got to tell you."
"You don't want me to take that chance, Ferlie?"
She turned her face from him, unanswering. And Cyprian incomprehensibly knew that he would never seek out Muriel Vane with that question on his lips; that her image would slowly drift out of his dreams and that before it receded for ever he could make no effort to call it back. Could not? Then it was true that no man worshipped only at one shrine in a lifetime? It was the Ideal and not the Individual to which he burnt his incense! The most startling part of this discovery was that nothing mattered at the moment save that Ferlie would be glad of it.
"As the years go by, one must change," he said diffidently.
She drew a long breath and spoke nonchalantly lest it should be interpreted as relief.
"She must be quite an old woman by now. At least twenty-six or twenty-seven."
Cyprian's laughter shattered the imperceptible barrier of restraint.
"How old do you think I am, Ferlie?"
She surveyed him critically. "Well, you are never any particular age to me because, underneath, I feel you are about mine; but the other girls don't think you look more than forty."
"They are a little premature. I am only thirty-five."
"It's a good age, you know," said Ferlie gravely. "How terribly short Life is; over before you have got anywhere."
"You think I have wasted mine, up to date?"
"It all depends on what you want in the end. Do you know I have a feeling sometimes that we are all just as much in cages as these animals, and can't get out without breaking something. The cages Chance dropped us into when we were born. Think how enormous and how interesting the earth is! And how much of it shall you and I ever see unless we break away from the particular bits we are imprisoned in? Just look at that old lion. He has settled down, quite pleased, forgetting that there was a time when he, or his ancestors, walked where they wished for miles in the jungle. And a lot of us copy him. Satisfied in captivity because it is comfortable. We don't remember what it was like in the days of our freedom but common-sense tells us it was unsheltered and unsure. My ancestors may have been gipsies and, if I had the courage, I might be one again by breaking things. Ordinarily, Martha and Mary have got me till I am seventeen; then it will be some finishing place in France for a year, and then Mother comes home and I shall be considered luckier than most girls in squeezing a Season or so out of Burma before Dad retires."
"During which you will marry, Ferlie, and settle down like a well-behaved little lioness and..."
"Live Mother's life all over again for her—ugh!"
She stared at the lion.
"No I shan't. It can stay there if it likes, and all the other fool-animals who don't know their own strength. I've got some inkling of mine. I am going to get out of the cage."
A passing keeper warned her not to shake the bars and not to go so near, Miss.
She ignored him, clinging fervently to her subject.
"That old elephant could turn the howdah off his back, kill at least twenty people and overset the monkey-house inside quarter of an hour. And, instead, he just walks stupidly up and down, up and down."
"Please don't put ideas into his head in passing," begged Cyprian.
"Well, he's only an animal and so would misuse his regained power. But a man needn't," said Ferlie, hot-footed on the trail of great discoveries, "a man needn't... Are you happy, Cyprian?"
"I—I've hardly thought about it."
"You ought to have thought about it. You have been thirty-five years in a world where there is unlimited happiness and unlimited misery. And you haven't yet decided which you want to choose: Spring days, and stars, and the smell of the sea, and flowers, and experiments in queer forces electrifying every creature that lives and breathes, or somnambulisticism ... listen, I made that word up, I think—in a stuffy old cage, the bars of which are conventions which ought to be broken into smither——"
"Ferlie, you are making that lion angry by beating the umbrella on his bars."
"He can have it if he wants it," she said, hurling it into the cage. "Martha made me bring it because she knows I hate carrying one. Said you always knew a gentlewoman by the make of her umbrella. I should think that anyone having to carry a special sort of umbrella to prove her gentility must be——"
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Cyprian as the lion crunched through silk and spokes, roaring insults at Ferlie the while, "Do come away. The keeper is on his way back here and everybody is looking at us."
Everybody is looking at us! That last truth would have vexed him more but for the tolerant amusement on the face of a lady standing near them. She seemed past middle age and indifferent to the fact, being practically and severely costumed in dark grey, while her iron-grey hair fitted so tidily into her toque that one immediately divined it was shingled. She fixed Cyprian with a placid eye.
"The unfortunate lion," she said, "breaking his teeth, like the rest of us, on an illusion flung like a challenge at his head by Youth in rebellion!"
Cyprian lifted his hat awkwardly in acknowledgment of the remark, inwardly deciding, a little acidly, that she might have realized he was, possibly, as near Ferlie's age as hers. But Ferlie, herself, twisted about with a rapturous greeting.
"Why, it's Aunt Brillianna!"
Aunt Brillianna accompanied them to the tea-shop, picking up the thread of Ferlie's discourse just where the end had blown loose.
"And when you have got out of your cage, Ferlie, and are no more mentioned by the long-suffering Misses Mayne, except in secret and grieving prayer, and when you have trodden on your mother's heart and taken unholy satisfaction in the fascinatingly soft squelch of it, and when you have seen the iron enter into your unbelieving father's soul on your flat refusal to mate with the most promising and dyspeptically desk-chained member of his service, and when you have laid the foundations for a new Utopia where everyone will find himself uncaged and free and—if I mistake not—naked, will there really be enough blue-birds in the trees to go round?"
"You are only pretending to laugh at me, Aunt B.; you know quite well what I want."
"Six eclairs, four dough-nuts, two cream-buns, a strawberry-ice and a dose of castor oil," Aunt Brillianna promptly informed the attendant in lace cap and apron: adding with a scrutinizing glance at her white face, "you look as if you could do with that list and some over, yourself, my dear child."
The tea-girl blushed and, reading sincerity in the friendly smile, admitted that she had had a particularly long day owing to Them being shorthanded.
"Never mind," encouraged Aunt B., "I'll stand you treat with this niece of mine, provided the moment you get off duty you settle down to it at any place where the cakes are not so well-known to you as these."
Cyprian protested at her making herself responsible for their own three teas.
"Don't be silly," she advised him, "I am quite old enough to make a nephew of you if I wish. Ferlie is my great-niece and it is quite useless to try and hide the ghastly fact. And I have quite a lot of money scattered about in odd corners of the earth. Some day Ferlie shall have some to build a Temple to her Freedom goddess or god. She will find, sooner or later, that the bars she objects to are made of gold. You ought to know that. How are rubies?"
"Ferlie has told you what I do?"
"Ferlie has told me much more of all you have left undone. Quite unintentionally she has painted a portrait of you in your true colours. I doubt if you could paint her—or any woman—in hers."
"I hope the picture did not impress you altogether unfavourably?"
"We are discarding the fallacy nowadays that Love is blind," said Aunt B. inconsequently. "While young and clear-eyed it has excellent sight. Later, it takes to dark-glasses of its own choice, and so gives an impression of sightlessness. Ferlie knows you better now than she ever will know you, Edward ... or, no, that's not the name—What is it, Ferlie?"
"It's 'Cyprian,'" announced Ferlie from a bath of cream and jam, "and you're frightening him to death, Aunt B."
"Can't help that. He's rather embarrassing me by being so palpably embarrassed. Don't blink like that, Cyprian. Are you young enough to join Ferlie in those poisonous cakes or would you prefer a scone?"
Cyprian coldly selected an éclair.
"Happy man!" said Aunt B., twinkling all over, "The sweets of life are tasteless against my false teeth. A watercress sandwich, now..."
She was a startling contrast to Cyprian's late-lamented aunts, influencing the life of Little Puddington, even under their heavy slabs of marble, by the trail of Guilds, Club-rooms, and Organ endowments left behind them. And Martha and Mary would have said, with one accord, that a woman's glory was her hair. A wig, or at least, a discreet frame, if not an actual transformation, would be preferable to that shameless modern shingling.
Brillianna Trefusis was too obviously one of those new elderly women who no longer found the Presence on the altar of wood and stone, and as obviously was Ferlie in love with her.
She caused Cyprian to leap finally in his chair at this stage of his conclusions. Intercepting his interrogative glance at Ferlie, exceeding the Safety First limit as to ice-cream, "You'll like me when you come to know me better," Aunt B. assured him.
When Ferlie was seventeen and a half, and the finishing school loomed ahead with its extra music lessons and picture gallery tours, Peter, too, began to have ideas about cages. He did not quite describe them in Ferlie's way but proved himself worthily her brother and, up to a certain point, allowed himself to be influenced by her opinions.
At nineteen, when Caius College claimed him, he showed signs of forging ahead at a pace which left her a little breathless. The enquiring expression had sobered, on the development of a well-chiselled nose, into the self-assured look of someone who has things to tell the world. To Ferlie he first imparted samples of these.
His reform scheme for the suffering Universe was to be based, of course, on psychics. As a first step towards bursting upon Humanity in the guise of Universal Healer, he had taken Havelock Ellis in large indigestible doses, concluding inflexibly that all trouble dated, not so much from Adam and Eve as from Lilith, who made of them Two, instead of One, like herself.
"Originally, we were in all probability One Perfect Sex," he told Ferlie. "Artificial experimenting caused the split, which, naturally, left one sex the complement of the other. We find the old allegory of Jupiter dividing by sword the race of gods which, having created, he had begun to fear. Ever since, each has been looking for its true half in order to regain the lost power the Perfect Whole first possessed."
"But surely the bi-sexual insects are the lowest in the scale of Evolution," argued Ferlie, shrinking somewhat from the suggestion that Peter's new Heaven and Earth, amalgamated, would contain no marrying nor giving in marriage. Because, though she, at fourteen, had pledged herself to eternally single blessedness, she rather liked to see other people marrying and driving away in their best clothes, looking happy. One never saw the same people again, somehow, after they had driven away. The couple which returned in their place seemed always to be a couple that asked nothing better of life than to sit still. The driving away spelt Adventure but, perhaps, they came back before they had reached that.
Ferlie was quite sure that, having once begun to drive away, she would never turn back.
"And you see"—she had lost Peter and returned with a jump to find him grazing in new pastures—"half the hysteria at the back of crime and all unhappiness is sexual. The economic conditions in this country which condemn so many women to single cursedness are disgraceful. And how can anything vitally important be accomplished for the Good of the Universe and the control of its illimitable forces, when this sex-hunt, and natural procreation, curtails such a disproportionate amount of human time and energy? The natural functions necessary for the continuance of the Race should be exercised almost as unconsciously as in the case of trees and plants, without stultifying analysation of emotion. It is time we strove for a simpler and less sentimental Ideal..."
Ferlie agreed that everyone who wanted to get married should be able to do so by means of a State Dowry, equal for all, but she did not see how Peter's Reform Scheme was to provide sufficient male mates even then.
"And is it a doctor you will call yourself, dear?"
"I shall be the First of my Kind," said Peter in tones which admitted no doubt of it. "Once through the usual exams, so as to give the old-fashioned geezers no handle—I have always felt Barker should have tempered the wind to the shorn lambs of his period—I shall strike out on Lines of My Own. I shall not attempt to explain them to you yet. But, first of all, there must come a Breaking Away!" He made a wide gesture with his arms, and Ferlie, furtively sympathizing with this draw-a-long-breath attitude, suspected that Peter would probably excel himself in the Breaking Away, whatever happened afterwards.
"I may have to deal a blow to many existing institutions and suffer a bit for my convictions," went on Peter, looking as if this would not prove the least enjoyable part of the campaign, "for instance, Marriage must go."
"Oh, really, Peter? I am rather sorry."
"It is a starkly barbarous survival of prehistoric ages; and now half the people who uphold, or at least weakly condone it, are making vows they do not intend to keep before altars whose sacrificial fires have long been cold."
He talked very well, thought Ferlie, and probably did not mean all he said.
"But, Peter, do you really think that the majority of people have stopped believing in God?"
"Few have stopped who ever believed. Many have never believed who assumed they did because the Christian ethics were necessary to the civilization which they found comfortable. Scientific minds are now demanding proof, and finding none, of many things upon which those ethics are said to be based. Therefore they begin to have the courage of their convictions. Lack of that has, up to now, caused them to accept marriage on the surface and to deny it by secret act. They have entered into lying contracts which are not only against Nature but against common sense, because they feared to be pioneers.
"In all great movements there must be pioneers. It's not a pleasant job, pioneering; nor is it for cowards. At present, my own brain refuses to admit the existence of a Personal God, who can be cajoled or roused to anger according to the behaviour of a swarm of little ants on one of the countless millions of whirling globes He is said to have made in His spare time. The Herd Law, developed by the strongest of those little ants, is followed by the weak majority under the guise of a Divine Law, until a stronger little ant than the first one comes along and amends it to suit himself, still sounding the Divinity slogan. Whatever name is given to this religion or binding principle, the non-courageous part of the Herd, which is the greater part, follow, etc., etc., and etc."
Visions of Peter followed by a Herd released from lawful matrimony caused Ferlie an instant's misgiving.
Of course it was admitted that the marriage service had been somewhat unfortunately reformed already once in the past by Cranmer, who, influenced by German relatives, had introduced the Germanic idea of servile obedience for the woman, absent in the old Catholic form. The modern Anti-Reformationists were rightly demanding fresh revision and omissions. "Stronger ants," she supposed. But, if they proved less strong than the Peters, would Free Love make a superior substitute to an institution hitherto regarded as God-given, though Cranmerized? Even if God had become, for the Scientific Mind, as obsolete as Cranmer? Whoever re-created two imperfect sexes out of One Perfect Sex had made a very thorough job of it. Besides, were all Peter's ideas quite so shiningly new as he touchingly considered them?
"You really have remarkable powers of assimilation for your age," said Peter, "and, unlike many women, are not hysterically upset by the Unobvious." (Ferlie hoped that Cyprian might, also, appreciate these newly-developed qualities when he came home.) "And, therefore, I feel inclined to trust you with an important secret."
"You know you can, Peter."
He braced himself for confession.
"I have met a woman," said Peter.
Somehow Ferlie had thought as much.
"Slightly older than myself," he went on. "She is a hospital nurse and, naturally, we have discovered much common ground to explore in discussion. The nurse, I always maintain, can form a more accurate estimate of the patient than can the doctor. Phyllis agrees with me that, in most cases, mental control should be established first, and hypnotic influence be given a more important place than medicine. The theory should be practised, not talked about. The advertisement earned by Coué and Hickman and their friends, becoming mingled with ridicule, injures their cause. Jesus of Nazareth avoided advertisement. He wisely foresaw the harm it did; and he never pretended to be doing anything that a disciple could not also do who sufficiently developed his will-power and self-confidence."
"You—you won't talk like this to Martha and Mary? At present, you see, Peter, they think you are so nice."
He waved a lofty hand at the mention of these shorn lambs of his generation.
"I have told you I believe in tempering the wind."
Nevertheless, although it was splendid to be considered fully protected against the searching elements of Truth, Ferlie felt that her wool might have been thicker after his final announcement.
"Phyllis and I, likewise, see eye to eye on this pioneering question. We are convinced we have a mission. It shall be carried out, not by word of mouth, but by example. We suit one another. We are healthy and, from a medical point of view, know all there is to be known about contraception. At present we meet in secret. I feel I owe it to the Old Folk to put my views squarely to them before coming fearlessly out into the open to state that, in the eyes of the God we serve, we consider ourselves married without the intervention of a priest or State official. Phyllis has no parents—thank goodness!—to bring pressure to bear upon her in the form of hysterical tears. We shall live together without cheapening our private relationship by becoming parties to a ceremony which, in our case, is tantamount to a farce. We shall remain faithful to one another without the urge of a public vow, loyal without the necessity of bonds to keep us so. Should we, eventually, decide to have children, they will be brought up on like principles and taught the utter unimportance of sex except for purposes of healthy propagation, and it will be a point of honour for each parent to do his, or her, utmost to fulfil the responsibility entailed at their birth, uncoerced by any Court of Law. Since the whole union will be based on reason, not sentiment, everything is bound to run smoothly. It is all very simple, really."
Ferlie knew that Cyprian would consider it lamentably complicated. And wasn't Cyprian a little more experienced than Peter? If Cyprian had married Muriel—and an unaccountable coldness stole over Ferlie at the thought—it would certainly have been according to Herd Law, if not God's.
"You mean, Peter darling—Doyou mean that you are living with this woman now?"
"Please remember that you are referring to My Wife, in the Eyes of God."
But Ferlie was considering the eyes of their uncle, the bishop. She wondered whether, as an only sister, she had done her duty by Peter. Mary might be a stupid old thing but she was led to believe, in spite of oneself, that she walked with God. Inspired by this realization Margery had conquered the pudding.
The Influence of The Good Woman was Mary's favourite subject for a Sunday Talk.
Mankind, she would say—she never called them "Men"—were uplifted by it, comforted in sorrow, healed in sickness, converted on death-beds.
"A lady with a lamp shall stand, etc...."
Peter, despite his lordly airs, was slightly pinker than usual and his eyes sought space above Ferlie's head. He had a beautiful skin, she thought. She did hope Phyllis was nice. She knew that her mother would have given up hope right away but, perhaps, parents, and even Cyprians, were a little out of date.
The Young were marching onwards, still soldiers, though not exactly Christian ones; because the old Christian Leader was out of date too. He was now just Jesus of Nazareth, the Founder of Christianity, as the Buddha was Gaudama Theiddatha, the Founder of Buddhism, and Mohammed the Founder of—was it Islam or Allah?
Said Peter, making a successful break-away from a pause which threatened to become uncomfortable, "I will introduce Phyllis to you, Ferlie; on the Q.T. We are relying on your support."
"Dear Peter," touched by this beautiful confidence in her affection. "Only I do hope you are both quite sure."
She wasn't a bit sure herself.
* * * * * *
Phyllis did nothing to decrease her uneasiness. That lady proved to be pale-faced and regular of profile, with quick dark eyes which never came to rest on any one object for long. Mrs. Carmichael had a weakness for people who looked at you, as she was in the habit of saying, "dead straight in the face." In thinking it out Ferlie remembered that very few ever did. Why should they? And, of those few more than one had been proved, later, own brother to Ananias. But, whether or no Phyllis was own sister to Sapphira, she scarcely glanced at Ferlie in shaking hands. She might, decided Peter's sister, be incessantly calculating sums in mental arithmetic. The fluttering of her eyelids apparently shut out visions which sought to steal between her brain and the addition and subtraction.
The interview was hardly a screaming success. Ferlie was irresistibly and unreasonably reminded of Muriel Vane and wondered, depressedly, on the way home, if she were going to develop into one of those women who mistrust their own sex.
She was Aunt Brillianna's guest at the time, and the latter swiftly noticed her problematical silences, but put them down to anxiety over the mail which brought distressing news of Mr. Carmichael. The doctors talked sagely of an operation and he was taking sick leave.
"If he should have to retire now he won't get his 'K,'" Ferlie reminded Aunt B., reading from her mother's inconsequent scrawl.
Aunt B. dryly tendered it as her opinion that the Family of Carmichael was great enough to survive that loss. "Leave us our nobility" had best described her attitude since the Houses of Trefusis and Carmichael had united. The ancestral title would ever carry more weight with her than any that might possibly be earned or bought by some Son of Trade with nothing to recommend him but Board School brains or a Bank Balance.
Ferlie, however, received a clearer idea of the workings of her mother's mind.
One returned from Exile with letters after one's name, the reward of thirty-odd years of labour, and in Europe people knew not what they meant nor even the order in which to write them. The Handle, an unmistakeable sign of services rendered, they could understand and respect, whether or no the man who wore it had received the just reward of his deeds.
"Your father," wrote Mrs. Carmichael, "will be the only one of the Family to have had his career cut short, if this illness presages early retirement. And this with you nearly grown-up and Peter becoming more expensive every term...!"
Ferlie could have foretold that, apart from the question of expense, Peter, at the moment, was unlikely to exercise a soothing influence on his mother's shattered nerves. She had an idea that Aunt Brillianna would prove the only satisfactory exponent of his case, but Peter had not been moved to confide in Aunt B.
* * * * * *
His parents came, heard, but found themselves unable to conquer him. Peter was a stauncher supporter of truth than of tact. His mother took refuge in unlimited tears; his father in the only ethics he favoured, i.e., those founded on the honour of the House of Carmichael. Decently-bred people simply "did not do" these things. Peter hotly denied that his bodily functions were at variance with those of the organ-grinder. This was the most unkindest cut of all. No Carmichael had ever ground an organ for a living and the comparison was odious.
Peter wanted to introduce Phyllis to them as his wife in the eyes of whatever God the Family severally worshipped. His father adopted the time-honoured attitude which forbade his son to bring That Woman in contact with the crystal purity of mother and sister. Ferlie, holding to the view that "better a little lie than much great unhappiness," refrained from publishing it abroad that she had already been subjected to the contamination of Phyllis.
Peter and his latch-key departed the house and were no more seen, and his irate father's emotions were presently smothered in a whirl of soft-footed nurses and suavely-smiling physicians.
"If Peter could only have waited!" wailed his mother. But Youth waits on nobody.
Once free of the Nursing Home Mr. Carmichael took a practical line: Peter found his allowance stopped. Then it was that he diabolically exemplified his theories regarding the common Brotherhood of Man by obtaining an organ and a particularly chilly-looking monkey who danced to the tune of "O solo mio," thus rendered by a Carmichael outside the paternal library window. No one could have guessed how the farce would end.
The last act was exclusively organized by Phyllis. The very opposition had lent Phyllis a fictitious value in Peter's eyes and his philosophy became for him the bread of life. To Ferlie, alone, he brought his accounts of Phyllis's unfathomable comprehension of his own soul. "Mixed into me as honey in wine," etc., etc.
Phyllis assumed the same proportions for Peter as had Muriel Vane for Cyprian; she was the Perfect Mate. And then Phyllis met a well-to-do surgeon, with reputation already established, who was not merely ruling an ethereally beautiful Kingdom in the Clouds. To Ferlie came Peter, wild-eyed and incredulous.
"But she said—But sheunderstoodthat she was My Wife," he repeated again and again, as if by the repetition he could find the key to the riddle.
"And, you see, Peter," said Ferlie simply, "if she had been married to you in the ordinary way——"
But that was going ahead too quickly for Peter.
"She said... She promised..." Surely that creed should be all-sufficient which admitted the word of a mortal soul to be its bond.
Mrs. Carmichael's sense of injury against That Creature for having caught Peter was now transformed into indignation because she had let him go.
His father, the danger safely over, resumed his man-of-the-world pose as though he had never departed from it, produced an extra ten-pound note, or so, and told his wife that boys would be boys.
Only Ferlie fully realized that by such means boys become men.
Aunt B., meeting Peter accidentally soon afterwards in the Tube, immersed in illustrated volumes whose pages unblushingly revealed to his neighbours on either side aspects of the human frame the existence of which they had, hitherto, blandly ignored, nodded her shingled locks in Sybillic understanding.
"Buses and Tubes are the most natural places to study the shapes of one's fellow-creatures," she remarked. "I see you are determined it is to be Medicine, Peter."
"Medicine must be the preliminary," Peter replied, unshaken in his resolve to arrive at summits unattained, albeit it seemed he would be obliged to scale them unpartnered.
"I am going abroad for the winter," Aunt B. informed him. "I may, or I may not, return with the swallows. When Ferlie is in her Parisian convent and you memorizing the seventeen Latin names for the stomach, or some equally uninspiring anatomical organ, in Caius, no one will be needing a garrulous old woman who finds it difficult to keep her fingers out of other folks' pies. I suppose when I see you and Ferlie again you will both have quite a lot of advice to give me as to where I should ornament a bath-chair for the remainder of my days."
If Aunt B. had been able to face the English winter, or, if on deciding not to do anything so disagreeable, she had left an address behind her for regular correspondents to bombard with the Family scandals, her departure might not have affected Ferlie's whole future. As it did.
* * * * * *
Peter had come down for the Short Vacation that Season, and Ferlie had clung in damp farewell round the high collars of Martha and Mary, and returned to town to lay in stores of more advanced underclothing than had been permitted under their care in preparation for her departure to be "finished."
The fortnight after Christmas she spent at the home of Margery Craven, now a red-cheeked Diana of the hunting-field, collecting brushes and masks of more than legitimate four-footed victims.
Thence, an unintelligible letter from Peter recalled Ferlie. It was so unusual for Peter to condescend to anything longer than a telegram that Ferlie took the train home with forebodings she tried vainly to allay. Something had gone wrong, he said. Plans for everyone had altered and she was needed.
She reached their town house to learn from the parlour-maid that her father had been taken back to the Nursing Home; that her mother was with him now there, at the moment, and that Mr. Peter had ordered tea in the library.
Ferlie sought him without even waiting to shed her muff and furs. It was always rather dark in the library, but the uncertain shadows cast by the red lick of flaming tongues in the deep grate, where a new log was crackling, could not altogether account for an odd bleared look about Peter's eyes. He was sitting in a crimson leather arm-chair, his shoulders hunched, his hands on his knees.
"Hullo!" he hailed her unconvincingly; and he spoke as if he had a cold. "I couldn't meet you—had to do some important messages for Mother." Then he explained.
Even if Mr. Carmichael's second operation proved successful, he would never return to Burma; in which case Ferlie could not go to Paris, nor Peter back to Caius. It would be impossible for his father to put him through the prolonged and expensive medical course on a pension reduced by high income tax, increased rates of living, and the expense of interminable doctors' fees which they might have to meet in the future.
The town house must, necessarily, be sold. Mrs. Carmichael would feel most the change to cramped quarters; she had been a Somebody among other Somebodies in the East. Moreover, out there, the "K" was considered a foregone conclusion with regard to her husband.
Ferlie's own disappointment receded into the background as she measured the full force of this second blow which Fate had dealt Peter.
"It will mean——" she faltered after a long pause, and stopped.
"Anything a fellow can get," said Peter, his air-castles a blur of undefined hues at his feet like the ruined rainbows of melted snow.
Ferlie wondered if it were true about the darkest hour coming before dawn. Wished that she could hear Cyprian's views on the subject.
During the next few weeks, however, she found herself consoling, rather than consulting, people. Her mother and Peter were too immersed in their particular aspects of the trouble to question whether Ferlie herself did not require most support, freshly transplanted as she was from a world devoid of responsibility to one teeming with seemingly unsolvable problems.
"I suppose you had better go," said Ferlie's mother. "One had not intended you to 'come out' so soon; but as it is impossible to tell what the future will hold for any of us, it will be better for you to miss no opportunity of meeting people and making friends. Peter will no longer be able to bring men down from Cambridge for us to know."
That took her off on a different track from Lady Cardew's dance invitation to Ferlie.
"Poor Peter," she said, "he looks so white and wretched and I am sure the thought of his ruined future is keeping your father back."
Ferlie said she had no heart for dancing. She, also, was looking white but as nothing had ruined her career it could only be caused by their common anxiety for Mr. Carmichael. As a matter of fact, when one has seen as little of one's father as had Ferlie it was not him one missed so much as his Presence and that which he stood for in a household.
There is no law that children and parents should be one flesh and it was with her mother Ferlie had corresponded; not with the man whose ideas on children's upbringing dovetailed with Mary's thread-bare creed concerning "Her that overcometh the pudding," with the added clause that should life not provide sufficient obstacles upon which to test the will they must be artificially fashioned.
In the end Ferlie went to Lady Cardew's dance, clad in virgin white, reminiscent of her confirmation, since Mrs. Carmichael's mind was nothing if not unoriginal and Ferlie did not really care.
White was not exactly the fashion for débutantes that Season, so it was unavoidable that she should look like a snowdrop which had somehow mistaken the time of year and arrived among a riot of summer flowers.
So, doubtless, would the young man have put it, lounging in rather a tired fashion in the vicinity of the Refreshments (liquid), had he possessed poetical leanings. As it was, conscious of the quickening of a somewhat jaded appetite for débutantes, he decided that he would dance this evening, after all.
Lady Cardew was greatly relieved by this decision. Girls were plentiful, men few; and she always prided herself upon eschewing that modern form of invitation which requests a girl to bring her "dancing-partner."
Ferlie was more fortunate than many in the possession of a brother whose good nature could usually be relied upon, although he did not describe himself as a dancing-man. But Peter had not been able to come to-night.
Lord Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, aged twenty-six, had lately, by an unforeseen railway accident, succeeded to his uncle's estate. For a wonder, not only were these considerable, but the means to maintain them were adequate. He was the Catch of the Season and perfectly aware of that interesting truth. Mammas had a furtive eye upon him; daughters a calculating one, as they weighed his tall but rather meagre proportions against the knowledge that Jack here and Eric there, if infinitely better-looking, were obliged to admit that their chins were their fortunes.
Dancers are born, not made. Ferlie was a Lucky One. Clifford Greville-Mainwaring began to enjoy her ingenuous enjoyment. She acknowledged very recent escape from school but wore a mystifyingly philosophical air which intrigued him. He had been fully prepared to initiate her into the mysteries of a first flirtation; always excepting, he supposed, the school music or drawing-master of ascetic or bulbous personal appearance.
But she had proved very unapproachable, even behind the most sheltering palms in the conservatory with its cunningly shaded lights. And he did not want to frighten her.
"There is something about you," he said, "which reminds one of a tune one has heard and lost and which one always hopes someone will come along humming so that one may recapture it for ever."
"But there are some tunes," Ferlie replied, "which, having recaptured, one would give a great deal to lose again."
His was not a very fertile brain and he clung passionately to his simile, which had struck him as perfect in its way; so passionately that anyone more sophisticated than Ferlie might have suspected him, with perfect justification, of being a little drunk. But she was growing sleepy and merely thought it exceedingly civil of him to insist on seeing her home.
His own car replaced the taxi that had brought her. She took leave of her hostess impervious to the launched arrows of half-a-hundred eyes.
Had Greville-Mainwaring not given his chauffeur leave of absence and so found himself obliged to drive the new Crossley, Ferlie might not have been so ready to accord him polite permission to call. So indifferent that permission. She was really uncertain of the correct procedure and, in her preoccupied state, took the easiest course, and then forgot Mainwaring in finding a letter from Cyprian awaiting her on the hall table.
Not till Lady Cardew put in an ecstatic appearance on the following Sunday afternoon did Mrs. Carmichael learn that her daughter had been considered "the success of the evening."
"Quite like an advertisement for Pompeian Scent or Powder, or whatever it is that is supposed to attract the elusive male," said Lady Cardew, warmly sympathetic with Mrs. Carmichael's reverse of fortune and very much alive to the possibility of doing her a real good turn. "My dear! Only imagine if something came of it!"
Mrs. Carmichael was a little fluttered. One had pictured Ferlie being introduced by her father, in due course, to the eligible officials of Burma. Though that dream had faded this was, to put it tritely, so sudden. And Ferlie's own silence seemed remarkable. Lady Cardew misread it.
"Girlish dignity, Linda. She could hardly assume anything on an evening's acquaintance, even if these modern young people waste very little time. And though there are the usual rumours that Clifford has been a bit wild, you and I, as women of the world, realize that it is better for a young man to have That Kind of Thing behind him than before."
* * * * * *
On the strength of this exciting conversation Greville-Mainwaring received a warmly uncritical reception when he casually arrived with his card-case the following week.
It must be confessed that, up to half an hour previously, he had forgotten Ferlie as completely as the tune so glibly cited on the night of the dance. He was going to a bridge party in the neighbourhood and the sudden recognition of her windows reminded him of a half-finished piece of work.
It might be amusing to take her out driving, with Briggs discreetly officiating at the wheel and the car half-closed. At any rate, he might as well see her again. Now he came to think of it, that unembarrassed survey of her fellow-creatures could not foreshadow Victorian innocence. And Clifford prided himself upon knowing the modern dancing girl for exactly what she was.
He was annoyed to find Ferlie "out." Gropingly, he fancied that she should have remained at home during calling hours, until his expected visit. Evidently, such a course had not occurred to her.
Mrs. Carmichael gave him tea at one end of the big drawing-room, full of Eastern spoil, and Peter strolled in for his, late, abstracted and unimpressed.
"I've heard that Ferlie is a decent dancer," he said.
And, "We shall always regret that if she, eventually, has a Season in Simla," said Mrs. Carmichael, "her father and I will not be there to see her a social success. Simla is always full of pretty girls, but, sometimes, I think that Ferlie has unusual charm."
Mainwaring, thwarted in his desire to see her again, began to agree. With Mr. Carmichael at home Clifford might, possibly, have been weighed himself in the balance and found wanting. The cooler judgment of Ferlie's father would not have placed the worldly goods, with which this young man might undertake to endow his daughter, favourably against the fact that he did not look as if he could ever have earned even a small portion of them on his own account, either in the past or future. The signs of dissipation on the not ill-looking, but weak, face must have stung to criticism the Puritan elements of a mind belonging essentially to the labourer who has borne the burden and the heat of the day. As things were, Peter took a more healthy interest in the make of the man's car than in his character, and Mrs. Carmichael saw no further than that here was a possibility of Ferlie's making up for that "K," lost to their branch of the Family.
Accordingly, Clifford Greville-Mainwaring began, rather frequently, to be found in the drawing-room of the house about to be sold over the Family's heads, and Ferlie, in a few hastily-bought frocks, frequented Thés Dansant and Private Views under the complacent eye of Lady Cardew; at which functions Clifford, invariably hovering, fascinated by her indifference to his marked attentions, waited to take her home.
Ferlie, too, waited for something these days, but nobody realized that it was the mail. Doubtful whether she realized it herself until that inevitable event from which, in looking back afterwards, she dated her "growing up."
Champagne-cup, mingled with the strains of "Wyoming" in a softly-lit private ball-room, made up Clifford's vacillating mind for him; the touch of his hands upon her thinly silk-and-chiffon-covered knees made up Ferlie's for her. There was no mistaking the passionate warmth of her refusal. Till this moment her swift glimpses of "Society," overshadowed as they were by anxiety for the future, had affected her only as part of a drugging dream. Now she awakened to the direction in which she was drifting.
"But you don't understand," said Clifford, too amazed for coherent thought, "I meant to ask you to marry me!"
"I know you did," admitted Ferlie gravely; "no one has ever asked me such a thing before, but I knew at once what you meant. And if you are disappointed I am very sorry that I don't want to."
She had a feeling that the rejection of one's first marriage proposal should be couched in more elegant diction, but, really, there seemed nothing more to say than just that. Marriage meant living with a person for always. She was quite certain that she did not wish to live with Lord Clifford Greville-Mainwaring for always. She enjoyed dancing with him but, when you came to think of it, dancing played an extraordinarily small part in one's existence. She was puzzled because Clifford did not seem to understand her point of view at all, and she wished he would sit further off. They were returning home in the Crossley, with Briggs driving. Later, Peter, descending the turn of the staircase, overheard Clifford's parting words.
"My dear girl, you don't know me yet! I shall go on coming until I get a different answer. That's the sort of man I am."
Ferlie decided it would be hopeless to explain the sort of woman she was, and wondered how often she could contrive to be absent when Clifford called in this optimistic fashion throughout the week. She was, somehow, inclined to surmise that his resolution would not survive a week's rebuffs and she wondered why she had not noticed before that he used some sort of scent on his hair. Meanwhile,
"That chap and Ferlie," said Peter, having faded away unnoticed to his mother's sitting-room, "are brazenly approaching matrimony to-night under the umbrella-stand. From what I could gather Ferlie seems to consider it an over-rated institution."
Mrs. Carmichael's embroidery dropped on her lap.
"You do not mean to say she is refusing him, Peter? When Lady Cardew and I have worked so hard."
"Oh, have you?" asked Peter. "Why?"
"It is a mystery to me," said his mother, "how short-sighted men can be. Do you happen to know his income?"
"I happen to have noticed his shoes," Peter retorted: "they are the genuine co-respondent article, and no mistake."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Do you like the chap, Mother?"
"What's wrong with him? There is nothing to dislike so far as I can see."
"That's just it," Peter admitted. "There is nothing to like or dislike—except his shoes."
Mrs. Carmichael decided that Peter was just being tiresome.
"It might mean a great deal to you if Ferlie accepted him," she declared. "He would be sure to make a settlement upon her—and if you could even borrow money, Peter, just now——"
Peter started slightly and began to whistle out of tune. Still whistling, he strolled to the door. On the threshold he broke off to say: "Well, of course, it's none of my business. To me there seems nothing to take hold of in the man, one way or another." A little pause, and then, "But it's Ferlie's pigeon, after all."
They waited for Ferlie to announce her dubious tidings, but, to her mother's surprise, Ferlie said nothing.
This was making Mainwaring too exclusively her pigeon. Mrs. Carmichael tackled her at the hair-dressing hour when the lights were low. Extracted confession.
"But, my darling, do you realize...?" So obviously, Ferlie didn't.
She stood behind her mother and her eyes sought the shadows of tapping branches on the window with a wistful strained expression. The mail that week was late....
Yes, she had resolved three years earlier that she did not want to marry.Hehad suggested that type of husband which men in her father's position were usually able to provide for their daughters and she had scorned the nebulous suitor. Did He remember?
It was a long time since she had heard of Muriel Vane. After her return from abroad Muriel had gravitated to a different "Set." There were Rumours. Lady Cardew palpably refrained from quoting them in the presence of the Spotless Young of the Right Set. If Muriel had attracted Cyprian what would he have thought of Phyllis?
Peter looked quite stern at any mention of that quite ordinary Christian name now. Ferlie wondered if it were principle or whether he still considered himself irrevocably yoked to Phyllis's memory...
What was her mother saying about Peter? Mrs. Carmichael's plaintive tones duetted with the singing of the kettle laying the foundations for her nightly cup of cocoa.
"And, of course, you must do just as you think best.... Poor Peter! Your father's convalescence is being so retarded with worry. Though, I'm sure, at my time of life it isn't very easy to begin to do without things. You, fresh from school, young and strong, will probably not miss luxuries.... And ... your happiness is all that matters, darling. I wouldn't for the world persuade you against your inclination.... Your father always says I've been too weak with my children.... I wonder whether Peter will ever get over it? Lady Cardew thought Lord Clifford Greville-Mainwaring such a desirable young man. Your father and I would have been so much relieved—for that Simla Season may never come off. I was relying on the Durrants, but Gwen Durrant will soon be leaving school herself. There was the question of your passage-money too. Do you know there are more than a million superfluous women in England...?
"... Well, good night, darling. Yes, I'm disappointed, but you mustn't think of Us; only of Yourself. No, thank you. I don't think I feel like cocoa to-night, after all..."
* * * * * *
Two days later, a Ferlie with brooding lips, who had twice circumvented Clifford's indications that he came of the Bull-dog Breed, sought Peter where he was engaged in discarding superfluous treasures for which there would be neither nor lot in the life to come.
"Are you sorry, too, about this marriage, Peter?"
He avoided her direct gaze.
"Girls do marry," he said, rather banally.
"I know they do. But there's such a thing as—being in love."
Peter sat back on his haunches, busily dissecting the corpse of a camera.
"I wonder!" cryptically. Said Ferlie, "You always thought queerly about these things."
"Perhaps I still think queerly about them. That is, if common sense is queer.... Phyllis professed to be in love with me. Of course you are naturally more religious. I suppose you inherit it from Mother. I do not mean that you are an orthodox Churchwoman—save the mark! But your sentiments are religious, Ferlie. Love, the Sacrament! ... and so on.Iknow that Love is a joke invented by Nature to enable her to work out her own ends. If you ask me what I think of Mainwaring I say he just can't be thought about. Whatever he's heading to be he has not got there yet. You could make pretty much what you liked of him. Also, you probably wouldn't see very much of him after that first honeymoon farce was played through. And then you could live your own life; one which might be made as interesting and as full as you pleased. And, you see, it isn't as if there were Anyone Else on the mat."
So that was what Peter thought about it. And now Ferlie knew.
In the light of which knowledge she opened a certain despatch-case and re-read the letters she had received from Cyprian since writing to inform him that she had left school.
The mining life seemed lonely enough and a thread of tiredness stole in and out of the neatly-formed syllables. Ferlie, with faint misgivings, asked herself whether Cyprian were not one of those men who might be described in a book as having made a mess of his life. Instinctive wisdom whispered that Muriel would have made a greater mess of it for him had she given herself the opportunity; but it was doubtful that Cyprian, even now, believed that. No credit to him to be so faithful to his ideals; it was just the way he was made.
"And if I had an Ideal," Ferlie told herself, "I could be faithful to it too."
At tea her mother asked her if she had a cold....
Articles of furniture were already beginning to disappear from the house; two valuable pictures had gone to Christie's. Ferlie suggested: "Margery wants me to go back for a few days. If you don't mind, Mother, I should like to go."
"Only till Monday, then," said her mother, rather miserably; "Next week the packing begins in earnest."
They were chivalrous to Ferlie in their studious avoidance of Clifford Greville-Mainwaring's name.
At the back of her brain flitted the ghost of a memory: the Zoological Gardens and a lion's cage. Somebody had told her that the bars of those other cages, the existence of which she had guessed at, were made of gold. Was Mainwaring unconsciously forging them now for her? She decided to discuss the matter with Margery. There was no nonsense about Margery. Her practical scrutiny of the situation might lay the spectres of those unborn dreams filming Ferlie's vision.
* * * * * *
And Margery, once approached, certainly made things sound simpler.
"You have no reasonable objection to the man?"
"I don't like his touching me."
"Do you like the thought of anyone's touching you? Not experimented yet?"
Ferlie shook her head, her face bent low over the glove-satchet she was sorting.
"Yet everyone, even in our effete, old-fashioned Guard of Die-Hards, has to tackle Sex in the long run," Margery reminded her. "Otherwise, how would the world go on? The Modern Aristocracy,aliasThe Smart Set which gets put on the stage, believes in facing more facts than usually exist. But itisa truth that, in marriage, familiarity breeds indifference to many matters one would have shied at the very mention of before."
"How do you know?" questioned Ferlie resentfully.
"I have watched my girl-friends marry and invited their confidences afterwards," said Margery with a retrospective smile. "Life is a muddle of rough and smooth for them all, whether they went into it with wilfully closed eyes or curiously wide-open ones. I'll tell you someone else who always seemed to me to be looking for sacramental happiness and getting terribly hurt when he found what he thought was trouble, just like you. The man who ought to have been your uncle and wasn't. I gather some folks have extra sensitive feet on the world's highway, and a too unshaken belief in the everlasting beauty of the hedge-flowers. By the way, do you know about that Vane woman he was so keen on when you were a kid at school?"
"Only that she turned out—not very nice."
Margery laughed queerly but did not pursue the subject.
"It's a mercy," she said, "that your Cyprian-man will have cut his wisdom-teeth by the time he sees her again. Do you ever hear from him now?"
"N-not lately."
"Well, his avuncular advice would probably coincide with mine if he were here. All men are like peas, and most women, when it comes to the Year-after-the-Wedding. Even Tristran and Iseult would have pretty surely grown fat at forty when the children were growing poetical. At forty everyone grows either fat or thin and begins to mistrust moonlight for reading the Book of Life by. In Cliff Mainwaring—I used to know him in his college days—you will have a husband who will never set the Thames alight, nor need to. And you'll live very peaceable in consequence. I shall expect to be asked to stay with you."
And that was what Margery thought about it.
"I havesurprisingnews for you," wrote Mrs. Carmichael, "Cyprian is at Home! His Company has sent him to attend someConferencein connection with themines. I have not seen him myself. He called when I was out and of coursePeteris away at Wimbledon seeing your father's cousin about that clerkship. Cyprian left a note to say he had beenlenta flat by a friend. One of those self-contained affairs in Jermyn Street.Service-flats, I think they are called, with the kind of lift which always terrifies me that you are supposed to work yourself by pressing buttons andnota hall-porter. I should notdreamof going there unless Peter were with me and, as likely as not, poor Peter would forgetwhichbuttons these days, himself, and shoot us into thewrongflat when it would bemostawkward to explain.
"Cyprian said he should be in allSundayif any of us cared to ring him up. You had better write and tell him that I shall be at Richmond this weekend myself, seeing your father in theHome. I suppose you will be returning on Monday and can arrange to meet him then and relate ourdistressing news."
For a wonder, Mrs. Carmichael did not forget to add Cyprian's full address. Followed the plaintive reminder that Lord Clifford had asked to be allowed to take Ferlie to a matinée on Monday; that the poor fellow was looking very pulled down and she was quite certain that if Ferlie put off Cyprian till Tuesday he would quite understand. P.S.—"My new georgette wasruinedby thathorridlittle dog of the Glennies' which costa hundred guineas. I would not pay that to have my carpet and my friends' dresses spoilt, and I don't believe it, though Lady Cardew tells me it is afact, but she is never very lucid in these matters."
The strong point of this letter, also, being anything but its lucidity, Ferlie did not waste time considering which of the canine commandments framed for drawing-rooms had been violated at her mother's expense. Three words, only, hammered at her brain: "Cyprian is Home."
(1) That explained his silence of the past weeks.
(2) He would be in all Sunday.
(3) She must see him before Monday's matinée.
Her way instantaneously seemed to grow clear and hard, like a path on ice. Perhaps Cyprian had escaped the rules of captivity away there among his lonely scattered mines.
Cyprian, who had come to her rescue in nursery-days when Hell loomed before her in the glowing grate, near the yawning tomb of the toy-cupboard and when the night-light, which should have illumined the tired pilgrim's path to a Heaven of sunny dreams, had blown out.... "And ... you will always like me best, Cyprian?" ... "Of course ... Of course."
If anyone could now prevent the barred gates from closing upon her, it must be Cyprian. If he failed she would go to the matinée, thought Ferlie. It would not matter where she went, if Cyprian failed.
"But," protested Margery, later, "I thought you were motoring up with Dad on Monday? The only possible train from here on Sunday does not reach town till just before dinner."
"It will do quite well," said Ferlie. "And I really must go."
At the station Margery launched her parting shaft.
"Good-bye ... My Lady! ... Remember, you can be happy, plus money, with many a person whom you could not live beside for an hour in a little cottage with roses round the door."
And she slammed down the window of the compartment for the traveller's last gestures of farewell.
So motionless sat Ferlie during the next two hours that an artist, thus minded, could have made a detailed portrait of her before the train sighed gustily up Victoria platform.
Rain, in the evening air, and black and gold puddles reflecting the passing figures.
She made her way along to the cloak-room and deposited the box which did duty for a week-end of light dresses, but her suit-case went with her into the taxi. The man received indifferently her stammering request to be taken to the Jermyn Street address.
Inside the taxi it was hot and steamy. The last occupant had mingled scent and cigarettes. Ferlie dropped both windows and allowed the rush of cool damp air from the flickering streets to whirl her hair about her face. She passed a chamois leather over her eyelids and nose, and shrugged impatiently at the reflection the narrow strip of glass gave back to her under a withered spray of lilies-of-the-valley.
She paid the taxi and waited to watch the man drive away, before turning into the bare stone hallway to read the minute directions on the lift. Although a more adventurous spirit than her mother she decided to walk up. Her watch told her that it was a quarter to eight.
* * * * * *
Cyprian had spent most of the time, since a late cup of tea, in writing. He was very busy. This could not be counted as coming home on Leave and he did not expect to have more than six short weeks in England.
Whimsically, he wondered, as the twilight deepened what it was all about—this busy-ness with regard to somebody else's affairs. Since he had chosen to turn his back upon a sheltered and unruffled peace (or would it have been stultification?) and taken the sea-ways towards more glowing suns than ever dawned upon the University towns of England, what Grail had he been pursuing? He had earned his bread and a little butter. For the rest there had remained the distant echoes of a siren's singing, now without power to lure him closer, and Ferlie's gradually maturing letters.
Had he wanted Ferlie to grow up? She had shown precocious signs of it during his last Leave. If he had lost his little companion of the Zoological Gardens England must now become as lonely as Burma. There was the influence of that strange woman who had had tea with them: the aunt. Her name had made him think of hair-oil. Cyprian laid down his pen. In the brightness of the firelight he had not noticed his omission to turn up the electric reading-lamp; and the East ages the eyes. He ought to feel younger than he did. One had to take malaria into account. How old was Ferlie now? Nearly eighteen? Still a child to thirty-nine....
No one had rung him up. He particularly refrained from asking Ferlie to do so in his note, in case she too should be very busy these days. There would be gaieties in town for the Carmichaels' daughter at eighteen, and hordes of young men who did complicated things with their feet in ball-rooms. Young men, so much younger than Cyprian, that they could not have shared his short career as a soldier, early invalided out in the first push.
Sometimes now, when he coughed, he wondered whether the surgeon had succeeded in extracting quite all the bits of shrapnel.
Ferlie, in those days, had not even attained the dignity of flapperdom. Too small for khaki-worship. And it was during those years, he had heard, that Muriel began to lose her silver-fair head. He remembered his one last futile attempt to win her before returning to Burma. His hand, the forefinger stained with ink, stretched irresolutely towards the telephone. As if in direct answer to the impulse a bell rang. The electric bell of his flat. Curious. The valet of his rooms used a latch-key, discreetly, when the flat's occupant was out, and had already taken his dinner order. The hand-lift would do the remaining work of the evening in bringing up the meal and taking it down.
He crossed the room and switched on the crimson-shaded lamp in the lobby. The dim silhouette of a feminine figure was outlined on the frosted glass of the staircase door. He slipped back the catch.
She stood in the frame of the dark fluted doorway.
White fox furs at her throat, fresh violets nestling in them from some country hot-house; above, the hair of a Beata Beatrix escaped from under her soft grey suede travelling hat.
So this was Ferlie. Ferlie, whose letters had grown mature.
"How long do we have to stand here and look at one another, Cyprian?"
The tremulous laughter of her greeting broke the spell.
Cyprian, blinking in the red lamp-light, was beginning to believe her an apparition. He stood aside to let her pass and slipped back the travelling wrap from her shoulders with hands which were not quite steady.
"I did not think you would be coming so late as this," he said. "You never rang up, Ferlie."
"No." ... She curled into a chair beside the narrow fireplace and held out chilled fingers to the blaze.
"I have been in the country all this week. I only came up this afternoon; the first train after I got Mother's letter. You wrote to Mother; not to me."
He ignored that.
"But, my dear—where are you dining?"
("Men," thought Ferlie. "Oh, Men!") She repudiated the thought of food with a gesture.
"Turn up the light, Cyprian. I want to look at you."
He obeyed and, kneeling, stirred the fire. She noticed the hair upon his temples, iron-grey; the little tired lines about his eyes and mouth; the quick nervousness of the sensitive hands. The East had taken its toll of the scholarly dreamer who had allowed his life to drift out on the tide rather than remain upon smooth shores to face a woman's "No."
With lightning rapidity the impression was registered on her heart that Cyprian wanted taking care of. She was not absolutely right. He was a giver himself. He wanted someone to take care of. Another flash, this time searching out the exact truth: Cyprian was not used to women.
"There has been no one since Muriel," decided Ferlie; and feared that name no more.
A gust of wind through the open door fluttered to her feet a sheet of close fine writing, the Greek e's betraying his classics and every letter standing out in equal value. It was the report on which he had been engaged that afternoon. She stooped and handed it back to him.